Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space is an innovative computer game which was
written shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union. It's a simulation of the US-Soviet
Space Race. This is a game for one or two players; you choose one of the two superpowers,
head that country's space program, and try to beat your opponent to the Moon.

The game has a lot of wonderful features, including a whole range of different ways to get to the Moon.
You can follow in NASA's footsteps and fly Apollo, or try the Soviet strategy of sending up a Soyuz
capsule on their ill-fated N1 moon rocket. You could even fly a Gemini to the Moon--a proposal
that NASA eventually rejected in favor of Apollo. Alternatively, you might decide we were
wrong to get away from the idea of reusable spacecraft, and put NASA back on track toward an early
type of Space Shuttle. Or you might even take the science-fiction-inspired Direct
Ascent approach with one big capsule that does it all! Not enough variety? How about
a Soviet scheme to land an entire Soyuz capsule on the Moon?

Growing up, I loved to read about the history of the Space Race, about the Mercury, Gemini, and
Apollo missions (back then we didn't have much information about the Soviet space program),
about how we went to the Moon, and I'd wonder why we didn't adopt reusable spacecraft back with
the Dyna-Soar. When I saw this game on the shelves back in '93, I was blown
away. Now I could fly to the Moon myself! Woohoo!

The game is reasonably, though not slavishly, historically based. Most of the programs that
reached production, and then some, are represented here. Quite a few changes were made for
game-balance purposes, but without taking away the historical feel of the game.

Unfortunately BARIS is a fairly difficult game--some would say too difficult (I get into that
in my Tips and Background, or you can read the reviews below). But it still holds
endless fascination and playability for those of
us who are space-obsessed. The game was originally published in 1992 on floppy disk.
A year later, it was re-released in an Extended CD-ROM version, which included much better movies,
and several small improvements that made it a bit easier, especially for the American player.

Historical Inaccuracies

Any historical sim is going to have a certain amount of simplification and historical inaccuracy, and BARIS works very hard to be true to history, but to make the game work well (and be fun), certain compromises were made.

The way the game works is based mostly on the US space program; much of how the Soviets did things is shoehorned into that model for the sake of simplicity and gameplay. For instance, the Soviets didn't have a central space agency; they had two or three bureaus that designed and produced hardware that was then approved or rejected by military and political circles. That would be very complex to simulate (and probably less fun), so instead they took the most important of the bureaus, which had the most influential leader for the first half of the Space Race (Korolyov's), and presented it as a NASA equivalent.

Infighting between the Soviet bureaus, and the duplication of effort it entailed, was one reason they were hampered in getting to the Moon. Another was that the USSR didn't spend nearly as much on the project as the Americans (an estimated $5-10 billion, versus $23 billion). They also got off to a late start: it took them two years to figure out that Kennedy's Moon speech was the start of an earnest project and not just a propaganda device--and they couldn't have started much sooner anyway, since a lunar program wasn't in the current Five-Year Plan. These differences would make the game awfully lopsided, so they were basically ignored.

It should be mentioned that even the Americans had somewhat more going on than just NASA; branches of the military started some efforts toward a space program early on--in fact, Explorer was US Army, though their program dried up shortly after. The Air Force's space program had some real substance to it and lasted into the 1960s. The X-20 Dyna-Soar, for instance, was USAF, not NASA. Likewise, the Air Force had a parallel capsule program called Blue Gemini which would have flown astronauts on military space missions. Blue Gemini actually flew some unmanned missions; it even refurbished a used Gemini capsule from NASA and relaunched it, accomplishing the first reuse of a spacecraft in history. The Manned Orbiting Lab was also USAF, and would have used a Blue Gemini capsule and a modified rocket stage; in BARIS the MOL is a mission where you dock two spacecraft together, but that can be any capsule/shuttle combination with docking capability: Gemini/Voskhod, Apollo/Soyuz, or XMS-2/Lapot.

Voskhod was modified to make it a true equivalent to Gemini, the minishuttles are substantially modified from their historical antecedents, and the direct-ascent capsules are almost entirely made up. Also the Cricket and Duet lunar modules are inventions of the BARIS development team, since they needed one- and two-person equivalents of the Eagle and LK lunar modules, respectively. The open-topped one-man lander from the Lunar Gemini proposals didn't work well in gameplay testing, so it wasn't included.

Another area where Soviet practices were made to conform to American ones concerns crewing the capsules. The American approach was simple: 1 man on Mercury, 2 on Gemini, 3 on Apollo. Not so with the Soviets. One of the two Voskhod flights had three cosmonauts stuffed inside without space suits so they could grab the three-person prestige first, and many of the Soyuz missions held only one or two cosmonauts. In fact, the reason they developed the LK lunar module (called L-3 in the game) was because they planned their lunar mission to have only two cosmonauts. But again, it made things easier and simpler to use the American plan for BARIS--although added flexibility in crew assignments could have been one of the Soviets' advantages.

Then there's the naming of missions: BARIS uses the American practice of using the program name and adding a number which increments for each mission, manned or unmanned, regardless of mission type (e.g., Gemini I, II, III). The Soviets tended to use different names for different types of missions. For instance, the unmanned (and canine-crewed) Voskhod missions were dubbed Cosmos, and unmanned Soyuz flights were named Zond ("Probe")--and both names were also used for interplanetary probes.

Intelligence is an area where the situation for the United States was carried over to the USSR for the sake of game balance. The Soviet space program was all secret, of course, and the Americans had to guess at what their counterparts were planning, with some help from what the CIA was able to sniff out. Fritz estimated that US intel was roughly half accurate during the Space Race, and that's how it is in BARIS--up or down 10% depending on your difficulty level. But the Soviets always knew what the Americans were up to, since NASA's doings were open to the public. KGB agents could, and did, attend launches. This could have been one of the Soviet advantages in the game (and, in fact, it is just that in Blast Off!, a spinoff to the game), but that's not how it was done in BARIS.

One way in which American hardware was made like the Soviet in this game is that during this time in history, the Atlas rocket could not be boosted--but in BARIS, strap-on boosters can be used with it. It's uncertain if this was done for game-balance purposes: not allowing boosted Atlases would make for a big handicap for the Americans early in the game.

Multiplayer

The original floppy version offered only Hotseat. However, the CD version added Modem and
Play-by-Email. This was, of course, written before the days of TCP/IP or even IPX multiplayer.
Unfortunately, even these meager options aren't fully usable: while the Modem option works in DOS 6.22,
BARIS fails to recognize the modem in Windows--even DOSBox can't seem to get around that limitation.

Operating System

The game was written for MS-DOS. The Floppy version usually runs ok in Windows 95/98, and sometimes in
Windows 2000 or XP. However, it can be finicky, especially the CD-ROM version.
Fortunately there is a freely-available DOS emulator called DOSBox, and I've had
good success with it--I've even used it to get the CD version to run really well in Windows 2000, which
is pickier about DOS programs than XP. DOSBox is available at
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/comp_list.php?showID=623&letter=B
. DOSBox is a command-line program, which means you have to use a bunch of commands and switches to use it.
Luckily someone has written a Windows interface for it, called D-Fend 2, which used to be downloadable from
http://members.home.nl/mabus/. You're probably best off using
DOSBox .65, which works with the latest stable
release of D-Fend 2, D-Fend 2.0.62.
I've written a guide to setting up BARIS to run in DOSBox & D-Fend 2.

DOSBox does require some processing power, so it works best on faster systems (i.e.,
newer systems, which tend to have more problems running the game natively--it's nice how that works out!).
To give you some idea, it ran just fine on my old PIV-1.8GHz, but ugly slow on my even older PIII-450MHz system.

If you've acquired the CD version but INSTALL.EXE doesn't run properly on your system, I have a
solution for you. Download BARIS_Installed.zip and unzip it to the drive
or folder where you want the game. It will automatically install the game to a subfolder under
the drive or folder you unzip to. Then point DOSBox to that location, per the instructions in my
guide above.

However, you can now bypass all the setup difficulties, slowdowns, and compatibility problems involved with running
the game in an emulator, because BARIS has been ported to Windows, Linux, and Mac. The
Race Into Space project is being
run by Michael McCarty, the main programmer of BARIS. It's still in beta and has a few additional bugs, but it
runs natively in modern operating systems and has an autosave feature, which BARIS lacked. I think it's better
than BARIS (even the CD version), and play it almost exclusively now.

Versions & Updates

Following is the game's version history.Liftoff!

Ver.

Release Date

Comments

n/a

1989

Board game published

BARIS

Ver.

Release Date

Comments

1.00

March 25, 1993

Original release of the floppy version

1.00a

?

Added UNDO button to Hardware Purchase screen, fixed some bugs

1.00b

June 1, 1993

Fixed some more bugs, made the game a little smaller on the hard drive

Improvements to Technology Transfer and Advanced Training, further visual aids to help administer the game

Downloading the Game

The floppy version is freely downloadable here, along with
copy-protection answers and the 1.00b patch. The Underdogs site also has the manual and Ken Fishkin's Hint and Tips
for BARIS. The CD-ROM version now has a couple downloads available. The game's copyright has reverted to its
designers, who have given fans permission to make it available so long as they don't sell it (see
copyright info). Unfortunately the CD version
is so large (250-412MB compressed, versus 9MB for the floppy version) that it's been hard to find a place to host
it in my price range (i.e., for free). I have, however, managed to find a couple hosting sites, so you can
download it from Sourceforge. If all else fails, email me and maybe we can arrange a transfer. Then again, I think the Race Into Space port
is better anyway, so I'd suggest downloading that instead. It's also much smaller than the CD version of BARIS.

If you download the floppy version, be sure to update it. The CD-ROM
version has no patch or update that I know of.

Goodies & Downloads!

Once you have a copy of the game, you may be wondering how on Earth (so to speak) to play this beast!
Or, you may be looking for some extras to enhance your BARIS experience.
Either way, I offer the following.

♪ Obnimaya Nyeba(Embracing the Sky) – Featured on the documentary The Red Stuff
♪ Ya Veryu, Druz'ya(I Believe, my Friends) – Featured, with subtitles, in Anton's Soyuz Lunar Landing (below)
♪ Trava u doma(Grass of Home) – This song is traditionally played when cosmonauts leave the cosmonaut hotel and head for the cosmodrome and launchpad

October 5, 2005: Added a link to the recent article about BARIS in the online
magazine The Escapist.

October 4, 2005: The link to download the CD version of BARIS (provided by
Macros2000) no longer works for whatever reason, so I've taken all the links I've heard you can download
the game from, and dumped them into a text file. I'll update the file as I hear of new
links.

September 9, 2005: I've translated this site (badly, no doubt) into French
for the francophone fans, like Cthulhus.

September 2, 2005: I added translations for the Soviet hardware (you'll see them
if you hover the mouse over the pictures).

August 26, 2005: I moved my largest download files offsite. Geocities has
a bandwidth-transmission limit, so when a lot of people have been accessing this site, it starts to block
access to it. The block resets itself every hour, so it's only temporary, but still, it's been
causing people some inconvenience. So with the largest files offsite, that should cut down on
bandwidth usage and minimize blocked access to the site.

August 18, 2005: I realized I made a mistake in my instructions for running
BARIS in DOSBox. Previously I had thought you had to set DOSBox/D-Fend 2 to mount the hard
drive that the game is installed to as D: and the CD-ROM drive as K:. The CD-ROM should still
be K:, but I just realized this morning I have the game set to D: on one system and E: on the other,
corresponding to the actual drive letters. It looks like I goofed--seems you should
tell DOSBox the actual drive letter that BARIS is installed to. My apologies to everyone who
had trouble setting the game up per my instructions! And if anyone finds I still don't have
it quite right, please please let me know!

August 17, 2005: Reorganized Goodies & Downloads tables to look more esthetic, and
maybe be a little more logically organized. Proofread my writing on this page, made some small
changes, and corrected some embarrassing typos left over from previous edits. I also added
some more information to my page about the BARIS Companion.

Added a higher-res image of the box cover, and a link to
"It Looks
Like A Dirty Beach", a fan fiction about a Soviet victory in the Space Race, which is set,
conveniently enough, in the BARIS universe.